As part of the University of Bristol’s Widening Participation programme, the School of Modern Languages (SML) organised a one-day Language Festival for Year 8 pupils in June 2025. The festival built on the success of the event the previous year and similar initiatives held before the pandemic and which were aimed at Y8 pupils who are at a critical moment in their education (i.e. Y8 before they choose to study, or drop, a language at GCSE in Year 9).
50 pupils from four different local state schools joined the Festival. They each attended two workshops in different languages: Spanish, Italian, Czech, French and German, with Louisiane Mailly, Lara Bonetti, Julia Sutton-Mattocks, Fanny Mallejac, Charlotte Faucher and Cathy Shail. Pupils also got to experience a lecture in linguistics with James Hawkey who added in some Portuguese abstracts and mentioned Catalan too! We had a really good discussion at the end of the day about what studying modern languages at university entails. Pupils also asked some great questions to our student ambassadors who assisted throughout the day. For many of our young guests, it was their first time stepping into a campus.
We got some wonderful feedback from pupils.
- Pupils loved learning new languages: especially Italian, Czech, and German.
- They enjoyed new aspects of language learning particularly cultural and linguistic insight: history, word origins, and how languages work.
- Many students praised the student ambassadors as friendly, kind, and helpful.
In the context of the government’s recent announcement of funding cuts for Languages Hubs, maintaining links with secondary schools through other avenues is crucial. The day also served to identify potential ways SML can continue working with schools to enhance language retention activities, such as sending Widening Participation tutors to assist.
The Y8 Mini Festival of Languages was funded by the University of Bristol’s Faculty of Arts, Law and Social Sciences as well as the University Council For Languages.
Report written by Dr Charlotte Faucher, senior lecturer in Modern French History, and Widening Participation and Outreach Liaison, School of Modern Languages, University of Bristol